The Best Cormac McCarthy Books
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Cormac McCarthy has redefined modern American literature with an evocative style that captures the raw beauty of the human experience. With a career spanning more than five decades, the Rhode Island native's work delves into the human condition, often through starkly realistic depictions of life on the fringes of society. He frequently draws subject matter from the American frontier, writing with sparse punctuation and a lyrical yet unyielding style. Often compared to the likes of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy's works illuminate the depths of despair, hope, and resilience.
His best books demonstrate not only his versatility, but also his lasting impact on contemporary fiction. Blood Meridian, for example, is frequently cited as one of the greatest American novels, while The Road clinched the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His talent for crafting compelling narratives is also evident in No Country for Old Men, which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem. Suttree, meanwhile, presents a more personal, introspective side of his writing.
The allure of Cormac McCarthy’s work lies in the hauntingly beautiful prose and philosophical undercurrents that pervade each story. His novels often offer readers a chance to traverse worlds that feel both familiar and unnervingly new, while also reflecting on morality, survival, and the essence of humanity.
Latest additions: Stella Maris, The Passenger
Over 200 Ranker voters have come together to rank this list of The Best Cormac McCarthy Books
- 1Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 Western novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy's fifth book, it was published by Random House. The majority of the narrative follows a teenager referred to only as "the kid," with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred Native Americans and others in the United States–Mexico borderlands from 1849 to 1850 for bounty, pleasure, and eventually out of sheer compulsion. The role of antagonist is gradually filled by Judge Holden, a huge, intellectual man depicted as bald from head to toe and philosophically emblematic of the eternal and all-encompassing nature of war. Although the novel initially generated only lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since become highly acclaimed and is widely recognized as McCarthy's masterpiece. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
- First Published: 1985-02
- Subjects: Reference
- Genres (Book): Western, Fiction, Historical novel
- Original Language: English Language, Spanish Language
Also ranks #11 on The Best Postmodern Novels- Also ranks #56 on The Best American Novels Of All Time, Ranked
- Also ranks #164 on Books You'll Never Finish Reading
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- 2The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed most of civilization and, in the intervening years, almost all life on Earth. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. The book was adapted to a film by the same name in 2009, directed by John Hillcoat.
- First Published: 2006-09-26
- Subjects: Survival skills, Literary, Adventure, United States of America
- Genres (Book): Speculative fiction, Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, Fiction, Literary fiction, Science Fiction
- Original Language: English Language
- Also ranks #1 on The Best Science Fiction Audiobook Performances
- Also ranks #3 on 'The NYT' Best 100 Books Of The 21st Century, Re-Ranked By Readers
- Also ranks #4 on The Best Pulitzer Prize Winning Novels
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- 3The Crossing is a novel by prize-winning American author Cormac McCarthy, published in 1994 by Alfred A. Knopf. The story is the second installment of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy".
- First Published: 1994-06
- Subjects: Literary, New Mexico
- Genres (Book): Fiction
- Original Language: English Language
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- 4No Country for Old Men is a 2005 novel by U.S. author Cormac McCarthy. The story occurs in the vicinity of the United States–Mexico border, in 1980, and concerns an illegal drug deal gone awry in the Texas desert backcountry. The title of the novel derives from the first line of the poem "Sailing to Byzantium", by W. B. Yeats. The book was adapted into the 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
- First Published: 2005-07-19
- Subjects: Texas
- Genres (Book): Thriller, Novel
- Original Language: English Language
- Also ranks #5 on The Best Novels About Sociopaths
- Also ranks #10 on The Best Books That Were Adapted Into Oscar-Winning Movies
- Also ranks #41 on The Best American Novels Of All Time, Ranked
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- 5Suttree is a semi-autobiographical novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 1979. Set in 1951 in Knoxville, Tennessee, the novel follows Cornelius Suttree, who has repudiated his former life of privilege to become a fisherman on the Tennessee River. The novel has a fragmented structure with many flashbacks and shifts in grammatical person. Suttree has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, and called "a doomed version" of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Suttree was written over a 20-year span and is a departure from McCarthy's previous novels, being much longer, more sprawling in structure, and perhaps McCarthy's most humorous novel.
- First Published: 1979-05
- Subjects: Men, Biographical film
- Genres (Book): Autobiographical novel, Fiction
- Original Language: English Language
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- 6All the Pretty Horses is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. Its romanticism brought the writer much public attention. It was a bestseller, and it won both the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is also the first of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy". The book was adapted as a 2000 eponymous film, starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton.
- First Published: 1992-05
- Subjects: Literary, Texas, Literature, Classics, Mexico
- Genres (Book): Children's literature, Fiction, Novel
- Original Language: English Language
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- 7The Border Trilogy consists of three novels written by American author Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. Although originally published as three separate novels, the books taken as whole have an architecture that sets the trilogy apart from the individual volumes. The romanticism explored in All the Pretty Horses, all but completely negated by the end of the novel, is even further desolated by the end of the trilogy. The despair and despolation evident in Cities of the Plain takes on considerably more weight when read at the cumulative end of the series, and the losses that pervade The Crossing are heightened by the greater loss of an entire way of life rendered in the final novel.
- Subjects: Texas, New Mexico
- Genres (Book): Fiction, Romance novel, Western
- Original Language: English Language
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- 8Child of God is the third novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. It depicts the life of a violent young outcast in 1960s Tennessee. Though the novel received critical praise, it was not a financial success. Like its predecessor Outer Dark, Child of God established McCarthy's interest in using extreme isolation, perversity, and violence to represent normal human experience. McCarthy ignores literary conventions – for example, he does not use quotation marks – and switches between several styles of writing such as matter-of-fact descriptions, almost poetic prose, and colloquial first-person narration.
- First Published: 1973
- Subjects: Tennessee
- Genres (Book): Fiction, Novel, Gothic fiction, Philosophical fiction
- Original Language: English Language
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- 9Outer Dark is the second novel by U.S. writer Cormac McCarthy, published in 1968. The time and setting are nebulous, but can be assumed to be somewhere in the Southern United States, sometime around the turn of the twentieth century.
- First Published: 1968
- Subjects: Tennessee, Incest
- Genres (Book): Fiction
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- 10Cities of the Plain is the final volume of American novelist Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy", published in 1998. The title is a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah.
- First Published: 1998-05-12
- Subjects: Destiny, Literary, New Mexico, Prostitution
- Genres (Book): Fiction, Novel, Western fiction
- Original Language: English Language
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- 13The Sunset Limited is a play by American writer Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy's second published play, it was first produced by the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago on May 18, 2006, and it traveled to New York City later that same year. The play was published in a paperback edition about the same time that it opened in New York. Some consider it to be more a novel than a true play, partly because of its subtitle, "A Novel in Dramatic Form".
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- 14The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by the American novelist Cormac McCarthy. It won the 1966 William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel.
- First Published: 1965-06-01
- Genres (Book): Fiction
- Original Language: English Language
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- 15The Gardener’s Son is a screenplay by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is the first published screenplay written by McCarthy, who primarily writes novels but has also written two plays and had three of his novels adapted into feature-length films. The story is based around a strange murder in Graniteville, South Carolina in 1876 that is without many details. At the request of director Richard Pearce, McCarthy wrote the screenplay for a two-hour episode of the television series Visions, which was broadcast by PBS on January 6, 1977. The story focuses on a young man embittered by the changes in his community due to the capitalist ways of the owner of the town's cotton mill. His anger grows until his rage consumes both himself and the families caught up in it. The episode was nominated for two Emmy awards and the screenplay has gone on to be published in book form.
- Genres (Book): Drama
- Original Language: English Language
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